Chris Dixon asked this question in a blog post yesterday: why does most enterprise technology feel like it is a decade behind consumer technology?

It's a great question and one I've thought about quite a bit. I see so many sub-par enterprise products that are able to succeed simply because they have a strong sales force. The enterprise sales model is such that one good salesperson can sell thousands of "users" just by selling one person on the product. And because of high switching costs within a firm, these products are often very difficult to displace.

I posted my answer to the question in a comment on the post and Chris was kind enough to write a blog post about my comment this afternoon (the shout out is much appreciated).

It's nice to see that more and more companies are taking a "user first" approach to client/user acquisition. If this approach becomes the norm, it should weed out the weaker technologies and allow enterprise tech to catch up with the slicker consumer tech we use today.